+ Sponsors

Thursday, 20 September 2018

Erorrs (Blog Note)

It's a good thing I'm a blogger. Yesterday I made a stupid mistake and wrote that the upcoming Sigma 56mm ƒ/1.4 will be available in both Micro 4/3 and Fuji X mount. That was wrong—that was supposed to be Micro 4/3 and Sony E mount. Mostly invisibly to you, I've made this exact error before—I have a sort of brain glitch that makes me confuse those two lensmounts more often than a person of average intelligence such as moi ordinarily would.

I'm pretty interested in the way my brain works, and I typically take note of errors in terms of frequency and type. There are some odd ones. I don't think I'm unusual; I think most people make certain annoying little mental errors. If anything, I'm probably different only in that I'm kind of an "enthusiast" of mine you might say. I tend to notice and track them. (Maybe this is why I love Oliver Sacks.) A persistent one is that I can sometimes get category confusions that stick: for example, in learning the names of the kids in a particular grade back when I was teaching, I learned every name fine except that I got two girls confused, and the confusion turned out to be permanent. I couldn't banish it. It lasted all year. I'd think, that's X...no, wait a minute, I always confuse X with Y...so was my first impression correct or was the correction correct? Sometimes it was one, sometimes it was the other. I never got it quite straight. Somehow certain confusions become stable in my brain. Don't know what that's about, but there it is. The two girls didn't even look alike!

Another thing my brain is bad at is remembering all the contents of a list. I always forget one item on even a short list. And on different occasions it can be different ones. And it happens even when I know the list well. I learned when I was teaching to never go around the room naming each student in turn, because I would invariably stumble on one kid's name (to that kid's distress)...even if it was a kid I knew well, whose name I never forgot one-on-one. If I go to the grocery store with my list in my head, it's inevitable that I'll forget one thing. Just one of the ways my brain works. No clue why.

One of my editor heroes, even before I knew he had a connection to the family, was the late David E. Davis of Car & Driver and Automobile. He turned out to be the best friend of one of my cousins, and so I got to meet him once. Another cousin worked for him for a while at Automobile before moving on to Mazda and Ford. That cousin told a story once about someone getting the name of a van wrong on the cover (!!!) of the magazine. As I recall the story, David E. (as he was known) called the staff together and read them the riot act. No axe fell on that occasion, but he promised that the next time something like that happened, it would.

In other words, if I had made yesterday's mistake working at a big publication, it might have gotten me fired. Or maybe it would have been one big strike among three allowable strikes, maybe. (I probably just wanted it to be available in Fuji mount because I can't afford the XF 56mm ƒ/1.2 Fujinon.)

On a blog, though, you just change it and move on. As I always say, I have a slacker for an assistant, but fortunately my assistant has a very lenient boss. Both me. The 10th step in my 12-step program includes the words "...when we were wrong promptly admitted it." So my policy is just to admit any mistake transparently and move on. Hits happens; erorrs abound; typos never sleep.

Anyway, I'm in luck. I'm not going to fire myself this time. More about the new Sigma when it comes out. And I'll try to be more careful.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)Featured Comments from:

Dave Millier: "Every day is the dawn of a new error as my old software boss used to joke."

Rob de Loe: "Even your mea culpas are a good read and a learning opportunity.

"My own curious brain 'error' is a near total inability to remember items within certain categories. If you stopped me in the street and asked me to name 10 bands I currently like I'd stumble after a few, but I promise you there are way more than 10 bands that I like and listen to all the time. Strange.

"I'm in the teaching biz so your comment about remembering names hit home. I'll share my all-time best 'pro trick': Names go in cycles of popularity. In any large class, there will be multiple people with the same popular names. If 'Emily' was popular 19 years earlier, then in a 100-person class there will be at least 2–3 students named Emily. I scan my class lists at the start of term and pick out all the groups. Then I can just stand in front of the class, look vaguely outwards and say 'Emily, what do you think?' All the Emilys will instantly self-identify by ducking, wincing, etc. I then just pick one at random. 'Yes, that's right, you Emily. What do you think?' Works every time."

Mike replies: I'm actually ahead of you there. As far back as grade school, in classes I didn't like I'd do my best to sit directly in back of another Mike. When the teacher tried to point to me and called out "Mike?", the Mike in front of me would answer and the teacher would let the error go about half the time. I still got called on sometimes, just not as much.

I also had another trick. In 8th grade I had a math teacher, Charles Kerr, an ex-Marine, who was long-suffering when it came to my various shenanigans. In the mornings, at the start of class, we'd review our own homework by going around the room giving the answers in turn so we could check our work. So I'd come in early and just count the seats ahead of me and do the homework question for the seat I was in plus the one on either side (to account for counting anomalies like the inevitable miscreant who hadn't done their homework). Mr. Kerr one week threw me a curve ball by starting from the opposite end of the front row than usual, so I started sitting in the middle of the second row—that way I was safe either way. I only ever did three homework questions per day in that class, and only got caught once.

Still and all, I would guess Charlie Kerr knew exactly what I was up to—that guy was really no fool.

In re your "Emily" gambit, my son had a recurring substitute teacher in early elementary school who called all the boys "Henry" and all the girls "Henrietta." The kids loved it.

Dave Van de Mark: "My earliest years as a computer tech came just as the first hard drives were being installed in PCs. That was a time when nothing about installation was automatic; instead you were required to enter scads of numbers precisely or nothing worked. Soon there were dozens of different hard drives and each had different specs that had to be inputted into the computer. The more you could memorize the better. I only needed to read the specs of a new drive once and they were instantly cemented in my brain. In my shop I was the 'Google' man, able to spit out to a fellow tech all the correct numbers. Looking back, what is interesting to me was I had to be very interested or enthusiastic about the subject for me to retain all the data. If my brain 'cared less' about something, recollection of details was not much better than anyone elses. Now it’s so short I can’t even get to a piece of paper in time to write it down!"

Mike replies: My brother had a good boyhood friend, the banjo player Jim Rollins (he's on YouTube in a few places), who was killed by a drunk driver last year. Jimmy-James had a protean ability to remember phone numbers—he memorized them as soon as he heard them. He was so good at it that in those pre-cellphone days his friends would get him to memorize numbers they needed but Jimmy himself didn't, so he was like the phone book for the group. As I recall, though, he had one problem—he couldn't un-remember numbers after they were no longer relevant. I don't think his memory otherwise was particularly remarkable. R.I.P. Jim Rollins.

Ulrich Brandl: "As a neurologist I can tell you that your brain works quite normally. Our memory works a bit like 'fuzzy logic'—slightly confusing items or non-remembering boring items (e.g. parts of a list) are side effects of an otherwise very effective and intelligent system. There are people with an extremely exact detail memory—but many of these suffer from autism spectrum disorders."

Speed (partial comment): "I can not now and never have been able to remember names. Thanks for the great post, Tom."

Nigli: "Mike, I sympathise. I do some calligraphy, and once I made the same spelling mistake in the same place at least 12 times. Tear up paper, draw new guidlines, write, make mistake, repeat."

Comments

Lists. Sometimes I forget the lists that have been written and go to the supermarket and come home with more stuff that I have already doubled up on... My late father-in-law had a loft sagging under the weight of bottles of washing up liquid. Other than that, he was close to genius.

I repeatedly misspell the same words and have to check the dictionary to be sure. As for the number of times that I find myself standing in the kitchen and wonder what the hell I was going there to do - best not numbered!

When I was a kid, I had the mix-up problem with two bands: Depeche Mode and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD). Two utterly different bands but something about the names or initials meant that whenever I heard a track by one, the wrong name would pop into my head and stay there and the other name was beyond retrieval.

A decade later, I met a French teacher whose mother tongue was French; every time she had to use the word 'dusk' or 'dawn', she would ask me which was which—that was after she'd been in the UK a decade or two, married to a local and speaking impeccable English.

I have exactly the same problem with lists as you do. I've resorted to using the Reminders app on the iPhone. My list is called 'Shopping' so asking Siri to 'add potatoes to my shopping list' works well. Each item is can be dismissed as done with a single tap and when it comes to the next shopping trip, you can show completed items and mark them undone to help remind you of repeat purchases.

I'm the dork wondering around the grocery store staring at his phone but it works for my problem. Paper would be great (and I actually prefer it) but the bit of paper or notepad was never there when I thought of something I needed.

Mike:I think most people make certain annoying little mental errors. If anything, I'm probably different only in that I'm kind of an "enthusiast" . . . I tend to notice and track them. (Maybe this is why I love Oliver Sacks.)

Sigh: I often confuse my cellphone for a 100 Mpx medium-format camera. Fortunately, I can almost always correct for that in post.

I can not now and never have been able to remember names. Thanks for the great post, Tom.

I make lists when I go grocery shopping. If I just need a few (no more than five) items, remembering the number of items usually works although you may find me standing in an aisle trying to recall number five.

Mike, you need to worry about something else. EVERYONE’s brain does some version of that. On the rare occasions when I go to the supermarket unsupervised, my wife texts me a list ( which I Still don’t always get right) We have proof readers to check content, and places to write stuff down.
That’s why God invented lists, and even He knew better than to go above 10.

Sorry to give my comment on at least one out of five articles you come up with nowadays. Somehow we’re busy with the same subjects all of the time. I especially like the off topics. Here are two books that are nice additions to Oliver Sacks. A bit more serious but even more entertaining! Sam Harris - Free Will and Dick Swaab - We Are Our Brains.

Ton Sijbrands, the former world draughts champion played blindfolded 22 simultaneous games in 2002 (17 wins, 5 draws). Some years ago I saw a documentary about him in which he said his wife always gave him a list when he did the shopping. He always forgot things, even when they needed just a few things.

Well, at least your agonizing choice of whether to buy the Sigma lens in Micro 4/3 or Fuji mount has been made a little less excruciating. Some errors can be useful. Come to think of it, the topic of photographic mistakes that produced something better than the original goal might be an interesting one to explore.

Hi Mike,
Regarding mind function, have you read "Thinking Fast and Slow"? It's by David Kahneman, a psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in economics for adding to the understanding of why people make the financial decisions they do. Kahneman, along with his associate, Amos Tversky talk at length about how the mind works; not the brain. They say that you've got 2 minds going at once one you cannot control but works lightning fast. The other is slower and more effortful to use when analysis is required. We try to avoid that slow mind whenever possible.

I highly recommend the book.

I go back to my copy every now and again and continue enjoying the read.

Really? You confused two very similar mirrorless mounts of two camera makers who are both extraordinarily fond of the letters "E" and "X" to designate their mounts, cameras and lenses? Tsk, how very... Human?

One of my more puzzling brain oddities is that I can't remember plants except for a couple dozen on a very superficial level, even though I can remember and distinguish between hundreds of animal species, with, I sense, room for more. Maybe it's chauvinism; it's certainly not a survival trait.

I'm so bad at remembering names that I've stopped trying. When I'm introduced to people, I don't even bother listening, because what's the point? This may appear rude to some, mainly to extroverts, but I don't like to be with them anyway.